
Columbus Museum of Art
American and European modernism, Columbus artists, photography, decorative arts, and participatory spaces reward connections between collection history, neighborhood memory, and making.
Browse the published Explore collection for Ohio, United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.

American and European modernism, Columbus artists, photography, decorative arts, and participatory spaces reward connections between collection history, neighborhood memory, and making.

European, American, Asian, African, ancient, Oceanic, and Indigenous American art occupy an Italian Renaissance–inspired building designed for deliberate cross-cultural looking.

Archaeology, Indigenous life, natural history, social movements, industry, everyday objects, and state archives make Ohio’s official history museum both an introduction and a research gateway.

The flown Gemini VIII spacecraft, Armstrong’s suits, an Apollo 11 Moon rock, aircraft, and Ohio astronaut stories connect one Wapakoneta childhood to the risks and teamwork of spaceflight.

Letters, belongings, recorded testimony, photographs, and a circular narrative route center veterans of every branch and era rather than organizing the museum around weapons or battles.

Tools, worker clothing, oral history, giant photographs, a blooming-mill reconstruction, and the mills’ final pours explain how steel organized the Mahoning Valley—and how its collapse reorganized it.

Six linked sites trace the Wright brothers’ printing and bicycle work, experimental flying, family life, and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s writing—an innovation story spread across a real city.

A 352-foot Doric column on South Bass Island commemorates the Battle of Lake Erie while deliberately facing a later achievement: enduring peace among the United States, Britain, and Canada.

Lawnfield preserves the farm, campaign office, home, and memorial library where James and Lucretia Garfield turned a Mentor property into a political stage and family institution.

Taft’s restored Mount Auburn birthplace uses family rooms, education, ambition, and civic networks to explain the only person to serve as both U.S. president and chief justice.

A downtown visitor center and Ida Saxton McKinley’s family home examine how first ladies shaped communication, policy, preservation, style, advocacy, and expectations across American history.

Youngsholm interprets Charles Young as Army officer, diplomat, educator, cartographer, family man, and pioneering Black public servant alongside the broader history of the Buffalo Soldiers.

Spiegel Grove combines Hayes’s 31-room home, presidential museum, research library, tomb, and wooded grounds—one of the earliest presidential library complexes in the country.

The Seiberling family’s Tudor Revival estate joins a 65-room manor, service passages, Gate Lodge, conservatory, and ten historic gardens shaped by industry, family life, labor, and landscape design.

A vast Romanesque prison built around an unfulfilled reform ideal now exposes cell-block scale, institutional routine, incarceration history, grassroots preservation, and a complicated screen afterlife.

The Walnut Hills home of Lane Seminary president Lyman Beecher situates Harriet Beecher Stowe within family debate, Black activism, antislavery networks, riots, river crossings, and the city that shaped her writing.

Dunbar’s final home preserves his desk, bicycle, books, family furnishings, and relationship with his mother Matilda while interpreting a literary career that crossed dialect, standard English, fiction, journalism, song, and activism.

The Rankin family home overlooks Kentucky and anchors one of Ohio’s best-documented Underground Railroad networks, where shelter depended on free Black residents, abolitionists, routes, secrecy, and enormous personal risk.

One of North America’s largest reconstructed log forts uses earthworks, blockhouses, artifacts, letters, and demonstrations to explain two 1813 sieges and the brutal logistics of the War of 1812.

Homes, workshops, a store, garden, church landscape, and archival collections preserve the Society of Separatists of Zoar, who held property communally here from 1817 to 1898.

Benjamin Latrobe’s 1807 stone house, restored formal garden, outbuildings, and Scioto Valley prospect interpret Thomas and Eleanor Worthington’s household, labor, politics, and early Ohio power.

The brick house where Edison spent his first seven years uses family objects, early Milan, guided storytelling, and a separate education center to examine curiosity before the famous laboratories.

The principal visitor center for Hopewell Culture National Historical Park overlooks a restored earthwork where ancestors of today’s Native nations gathered, buried honored dead, and placed extraordinary materials two millennia ago.

A nearly 1,200-foot circular enclosure, high earthen wall, interior ditch, and ceremonial gateway survive from the immense Newark Earthworks complex and now anchor its visitor orientation.

An octagon joined to a vast circle preserves precise sightlines to extreme lunar risings and settings, revealing Hopewell engineering at a scale best understood by walking rather than aerial diagram alone.

More than three miles of Hopewell-era walls crown a Little Miami bluff, enclosing gateways, calendar mounds, a museum, recreated garden, and trails within North America’s largest ancient hilltop enclosure.

A 1,348-foot serpent undulates along a bluff above Ohio Brush Creek, its spiral tail, curves, oval head feature, nearby burial mounds, and unresolved chronology demanding slow, respectful observation.

Hundreds of ancient quarry pits, workshops, forest trails, and a museum built over an excavation reveal how brilliantly colored Vanport flint became tools, offerings, and a continent-spanning material.

Forest, ravines, farms, waterfalls, canal locks, towpath, rail line, villages, and a recovering Cuyahoga River form a long, narrow national park between Cleveland and Akron.

Seven separated hiking areas reveal towering cliffs, hemlock gorges, rock shelters, waterfalls, narrow passages, and the erosion of massive Black Hand sandstone beds.

The Clear Fork cuts through forested sandstone country where gorge trails, Lyon Falls, a covered bridge, Pleasant Hill Lake, mountain biking, paddling, and adjoining state forest create many different park days.

Rim trails, river paths, limestone and dolomite cliffs, camping, climbing, and an adjoining nature preserve follow the Little Miami through western Ohio’s most dramatic gorge.

Jointed Sharon Conglomerate breaks into ledges, slots, rooms, waterfalls, and talus where color-coded routes range from a gentle overlook walk to hands-on scrambling through tight passages.

A broad western Lake Erie park combines barrier beach, restored wetland, accessible boardwalk, inland lake, meadow, lodge, campground, and one of Ohio’s most productive migration corridors.

Steep forested hills, Roosevelt and Turkey Creek lakes, backpacking connections, lodge overlooks, and Civilian Conservation Corps landscapes form Ohio’s “Little Smokies” along the Ohio River escarpment.

Forest coves, open water, wetlands, meadows, trails, historic Kennedy Stone House, golf, lodge, camping, and wildlife occupy a vast park whose scale rewards choosing one shoreline district.

A 326-mile route links Cincinnati, Columbus, Akron, and Cleveland through rail-trails, canal towpaths, rural roads, Amish country, riverfronts, and city connectors.

Railroad grades carry cyclists, runners, and walkers beside the Little Miami through forest, river towns, bridges, parks, and the Xenia trail hub with unusually gentle elevation.

A mostly level crushed-limestone trail follows canal locks, aqueduct remains, farms, wetlands, towns, and the Cuyahoga River for about twenty miles inside the national park and much farther beyond.

More than 1,400 miles circle Ohio through Lake Erie shore, canal corridors, Appalachian ridges, state forests, farmland, cities, and road connectors maintained by a statewide volunteer network.

The Little Miami River races through a postglacial gorge of Silurian limestone and dolomite, revealing potholes, slump blocks, fossils, rapids, and cool habitats along cliff-edge trails.

A cool, narrow Black Hand Sandstone ravine offers an accessible lower approach beneath 200-foot walls, while an exposed rim loop climbs above the canopy for demanding cliff-edge views.

A forest trail crosses a working-landscape edge to reach a slender Black Hand Sandstone arch more than 100 feet long above a tributary ravine of the Hocking River.

A 400-foot trough of parallel grooves exposes Devonian limestone, marine fossils, and the abrasive force of debris-laden ice on an island reached only by ferry, boat, or plane.

A mile-long boardwalk enters Ohio’s richest calcareous fen complex, where cold mineral groundwater supports orchids, sedges, northern white cedar, prairie species, spotted turtles, and remarkable seasonal change.

A Victorian glasshouse opens into rainforest, desert, Pacific-island, bonsai, culinary, and seasonal gardens where plants share the stage with a major Dale Chihuly installation.

A vast Lake County landscape joins cultivated collections, native forests, ponds, and ravines with a 65-foot canopy walk and a 120-foot tower looking toward Lake Erie.

Nearly 2,000 acres combine a historic home landscape, Japanese garden, cypress swamp, conifer glen, native habitats, and an eight-mile driving tour east of Columbus.